


Empty, like valleys

by gedsparrowhawk (FaceChanger)



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/M, Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-02
Updated: 2016-04-02
Packaged: 2018-05-30 20:21:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6438838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FaceChanger/pseuds/gedsparrowhawk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here they both are, lost and alone again, everything they’ve worked to build poised to crumble around their ears. The fire cricket still sings in the bushes. The turtle ducks have retreated somewhere. One of the trees behind Katara has kept its flowers late into the spring. A petal falls (like the first drop of a typhoon), off-white bruised to brown.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Empty, like valleys

> _Who can by stillness, little by little_  
>  _make what is troubled grow clear?  
> _ _Who can by movement, little by little  
> _ _make what is still grow quick?_

 

After years of masters, first his firebending instructor and then his uncle, standing near him as he sat, their voices telling him to practice his breathing and let his thoughts flow (like sparks said his childhood tutor, like water said Iroh), Firelord Zuko has finally learned to meditate.

Air, in through his nose, filling his lungs, out through his mouth, feel the flow of his qi. Three years of anger gone, disappointment, shame, all gone. Relentless, straightforward obsession to capture the Avatar replaced by the frustrating, circuitous rebuilding of the Fire Nation. The lonely expanse of the ocean replaced by claustrophobic council rooms. He feels like a child in a man’s role. Another breath. Zuko sits in the garden, near the pond, listening to the sounds around him: the turtle ducks paddle in small circles in the pond; a fire cricket sings somewhere in the bushes to his left; dimly, the sounds of the palace filter in through open windows and doorways; there is a footstep behind him.

He opens his eyes, but doesn’t move immediately. He has forbidden his advisors from following here, after the first few months when he had made himself ill trying to keep up with everything they wanted from him. The gardener comes in sometimes, but his footfalls are heavy, and he whistles as he walks - and he knows not to interrupt the Firelord while he is meditating. Mai comes sometimes too, with a whisper of silk like a knife slicing through air, but she’s visiting her father for a month.

“Zuko,” a voice says.

He turns.

Katara stands just on the edge of the grass, her bare toes curling in the dew. She’s tanned from the last time he saw her, months ago, nut brown and golden all at once, and she’s grown a couple inches, he thinks.

“What are you doing here?” he asks. He doesn’t mean to sound accusatory, as if his loneliness is her fault, but he thinks, from the look that flashes across her face, that he must have.

“I thought you’d be glad to see me,” she says.

“I am!” He stands, stares at her. “I wasn’t expecting you.” She’s wearing blue silks (and the skirt swirls around her ankles in the breeze like waves against the shoreline). He wonders where she got the clothes. He wonders why she’s here. “Has something happened?”

“I -” She hesitates, and he thinks she must have anticipated this moment, and now finds it harder than she had thought it would be. “No, nothing has happened. I just, I needed to travel again. I sent a hawk.”

Zuko shakes his head. “I never got one.” She looks unsure, and he hastens to put her at ease. “I’m glad to see you,” he says. She relaxes, and he knows from the set of her shoulders that she’s not telling him everything; maybe nothing terrible has happened, but something has driven her from the South Pole, from her family, and into his garden. “How did you get here?”

She shrugs. “I took a boat. Traders going to the Earth Kingdom first, and then from there a ship to Ember Island.” She grins suddenly. “Did you know they’ve redone The Boy in the Iceberg?”

Zuko groans. “I do! They wanted to put it on in the palace for the Solstice last year.”

She laughs. He’s missed her laugh. He’d had so little time with his friends. Only a few months after Ozai’s fall to begin reestablishing the Fire Nation, and now two years later he’s seen them only a few times since. “At least your scar’s not on the wrong side anymore!” she teases.

“You watched it?” he demands.

She looks smug, “I gave them a few pointers after the show, too.”

He grins. “Is Aang still a woman?”

“Yeah,” she says, but she suddenly deflates a little, and he realizes his mistake.

“He came to visit two weeks ago,” Zuko tells her. “Just for an afternoon. He said he was going to the Air Temples.”

“Is that all he said?”

“He said you two fought.”

“We didn’t fight!”

Zuko is taken aback. “He seemed dejected about something.”

She makes a strangled noise of frustration, but the water in the pond behind him sloshes and a fine mist fills the air, betraying her anger. So this is it then, the reason she is here. The turtle ducks quack in alarm. “He’s the Avatar, keeper of balance, savior of the world. He has a thousand generations of lives, so how can he be so stupid?”

Zuko looks at her. “Are you sure you didn’t fight?”

She sighs, and the water returns to the pond. The turtle ducks are still suspicious. “We broke up.”

“Oh,” Zuko says. He bites back a rush of emotions that he doesn’t understand.

“It was a long time coming.” She walks to the pond and sits in the grass, her toes just touching the water (he thinks, from watching her, that the touch of her element reassures her). Zuko sits beside her. “He’s just… I love him,” she says, looking over at the scarred side of Zuko’s face. “But I love him like I love Sokka. Or Toph,” she adds after a beat. “And I guess after the war I thought that I could love him like something else. And I think I did for a while. But after everything settled down, first here and then at the Southern Water Tribe, and I actually sat down with him, I realized…” She shrugs and pulls an orb of water out of the pond, holding it perfectly still. “So I talked to him, and he tried to tell me we could work through it, and I told him I didn’t want to work through it, and then he said he was going to go to the Air Temples, and we could talk about it when he got back.” An intrepid turtle duck paddles under the orb, and Katara lowers the orb until it is hanging just above the creature’s head.

Zuko sighs and sits back on his hands. Is she following Aang, then? Or is she running away from him? He’s gotten better at reading people’s motives, but the depths of Katara remain a mystery to him. He doesn’t know if fire can ever understand water. He doesn’t know why he cares so much.

“Things haven’t settled down,” he says, rather than commenting on her and Aang.

“What?” She turns to him and drops the orb onto the startled mallard.

“Things here. They haven’t settled down.” He rubs a hand over his face and glances at the sun. “In an hour, I have a meeting about an uprising in one of the northern islands led by some of the old soldiers.”

She looks startled. “What for?”

He waves a hand. “These things have been flaring up from time to time, people who aren’t happy the war is over.”

“That’s ridiculous! I mean, I understand immediately after the war ended, but two years later?”

He remembers his own reaction the first few uprisings. And then his advisors, by turns, patient, annoying, wheedling, pushy, had calmed him down and one after another tempers had been soothed, wounds had been salved. But still, people rebelled.

He murmurs something his uncle had told him. “After one hundred years, war becomes a habit.”

The calm from his meditation is dissipating in the face of Katara’s obvious agitation. He can feel it rolling off of her in waves (like a sea churning ahead of a storm).

“So break the habit!” She says, as if it were that easy.

Her words bring back the frustration he had been running from earlier that day. He stands up abruptly and walks away from her, his scar drawing tight across the side of his face. His palms burn. “I’m trying!”

She starts to say something more and he turns back to her, holding back the fire racing through his veins and sparking at his fingertips. “Katara, you don’t understand what has happened to this country. Three generations, a hundred years of war.”

She’s on her feet as well. “Zuko, my tribe was destroyed!”

“I know!” he says. “But listen, it’s not a matter of rebuilding in the wake of catastrophe. There are people who support me, but there are people who think my father was right. People here did well before, and then I came and took that all away. I have to change all of their minds, undo a hundred years of certainty, and I -”

He stops.

Swallows.

Zuko hasn’t said it outloud, but Katara is standing right there, and he never says what he means to say around her. “I don’t know if I can.”

Here they both are, lost and alone again, everything they’ve worked to build poised to crumble around their ears. The fire cricket still sings in the bushes. The turtle ducks have retreated somewhere. One of the trees behind Katara has kept its flowers late into the spring. A petal falls (like the first drop of a typhoon), off-white bruised to brown.

She looks stricken.

He bows his head, fighting back the sickeningly familiar shame of failure. How does she always find him in his weak moments?

There’s a whisper of movement and she stands before him, her cool fingers on his face, on his scar. “They’re scarred,” she says. “By the war.”

He nods.

“Like you.”

He looks away, but her fingers are still on the rough, hot skin of his scar, persistent and cool (water on embers).

“Like all of us.”

He looks back at her. “We’ve all been burned,” he says, his voice hoarse.

She has nothing to say to that.

After a moment, she  withdraws her hand from his face. He can feel the ghost of her fingertips as she walks back to the pond and stands staring at the water. She’s gained weight, he notes, around her hips and face, her angles softening. He thinks of the straight and brittle girl who pursued her mother’s killer across oceans and showed him mercy. She’s two years older now, more woman than girl, hurt by the Fire Nation again and again, and yet at her core is that same unrelenting mercy. His father would have called it weakness. Zuko thinks she is stronger than he is.

“It reminds me of the Spirit Oasis,” she says.

He hums something noncommittal.

“I’ve been reading,” she begins. “Some of the old healer scrolls from the North Pole.”

He didn’t know she had been back to the North Pole.

“There was a healer, before the war, before Roku,” she says. “She theorized that our bodies bend all four elements.”

Zuko barks out a laugh. He imitates one of her bending moves, the slow sweeping push and pull, and the pond doesn’t move.

She shakes her head. “No, no. Not bending. But.” She puts her hand on his chest, and moved with the rise and fall of his chest. “Your lungs bend the air.” She moves her hand to above the steady thump of his heart (stopped once by lightning, jumping in front of this mysterious girl with the ocean eyes). “Your heart bends your blood.” She looks rueful. “That’s waterbending, after all.” She moves her hand down to his stomach. “Earth.”

“What about fire?” he asks.

“You know the answer to that,” she says.

He remembers the dragons and the conflagration rising in a thousand colors he had never seen before. Fire is life itself. It drives everything onward.

He holds out his palm and a flame sparks to life, flickering like a heartbeat. “Fire doesn’t heal,” he says. “Water does.”

She smiles at him and his heart breaks. She knows what he’s asking and she’s refused. “Scars don’t heal,” she tells him gently. He thinks of the cavern, when she’d offered to heal his scar. “But of all people, you should know. They mark our history, not our future. People will look to you and see that in time. From your honor will come the Fire Nation’s honor. From your peace will come the Fire Nation’s peace.”

He smiles at her wryly. “Did you come all this way to give me political advice?”

“No!” She bends a surprise splash of water at him, and he ducks out of the way easily. “No! I came because rebuilding the Southern Water Tribe is hard work, and I need a vacation.”

“So you came to the Fire Nation.” Just as he does, she’s run for a moment from her duties and into the garden.

“It’s warm here.” She closes her eyes and smiles up at the sun. “I missed the warmth.”

He’s missed her. He’s missed her laugh and her smile and her ocean eyes and the way she seems to move like the tide. He’s missed her long looks and her righteous anger and her mercy. He watches her standing in the sunlight, as she starts to tell him about the plans she has for the Southern Water Tribe: a harbor, and a bending school, and maybe a library. He’s as helpless before her as a candle before a tsunami. He aches because she is everything he is not.

He wishes she would stay with him in this garden, away from all the responsibilities their destinies have tasked them with. But this is no place for her.

She belongs to the ocean, and the full moon. There are shards of ice in her gaze and the lithe assurance of power in her muscles. She wears it well.

Iroh learned to redirect lightning from the waterbenders, and Zuko thinks he might learn to run the Fire Nation from the wisdom of a Water Tribe girl.

 

> _To follow the Way_  
>  _is not to need fulfillment.  
>  _ _Unfulfilled, one may live on  
>  needing no renewal._
> 
> _-Lao Tzu_

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title, opening, and closing quotes from Ursula K. Le Guin's translation of the Tao Te Ching


End file.
